How to Use Deadlines to Make Your Marketing More Effective

One of the most successful mass marketing campaigns in history was computer companies involved with fixing the Y2K bug. In hindsight, it was a wonderful opportunity to sell product and help people prepare and eliminate the possibility of worldwide mayhem.

Nobody knew for sure how we all would be affected. If we had not acted and rectified the defect, we may have been hit hard economically. Power outages and fuel supply disruptions would have been bad enough to send economies into a tailspin. Let us examine why some computer companies were successful and got all the orders.

One of the driving forces that make people act is a deadline. This was a deadline like never before in history. It was the ultimate doomsday scenario.

By creating the deadline in advance on a PC, the clock calendar was forwarded until a couple of minutes before the deadline …and there we stood waiting to see what would happen. A wise guy at the back of the crowd went, “Bang!!!” at the crucial time and we all had an instant “change-of-state” and loads of laughs.

The deadline made it easy to coax people into acting and upgrading their equipment. With well publicized close-off-date and phrases like, “Avoid the Christmas and the Year 2000 rush” …made marketing simple.

The message this month is about getting people to act on your marketing message. Take a hypothetical case of someone getting an attractive offer in the weekend mail.

If you can imagine overnight it had started snowing and our customer has to find a postage stamp, bundle up in warm clothing and battle the snowstorm to drive and post the letter to get the benefits of the offer before the closing date.

You do need a very compelling reason to get people to act in these circumstances. There are always persons who will be interested in your marketing message, but in failing to act forget about the proposition and the opportunity flies out the window. Solve the problem of indifference and marketing becomes much easier.

How do we get people to act on your offers? Unfortunately, we do not have a regular Y2K bug theme so we need to create a deadline of our own. Limited availability and premiums are good examples and work very well. In a computer repair business, one way to inject immediate action is to advertise a discount in select neighborhoods for a limited time.

The headline would go like this: “How to Get Your Computer Serviced at Low Cost …This Week Only in the XXXX Location.” An immediate response would save the customer the cost of on-site callout charges. It is an efficient use of time operating in the one area and arranging non-urgent service work. By the customer taking immediate action a win-win situation is created.

How the Y2K Bug Made Generating New Business …Easy

By the time the Y2K bug was becoming common knowledge there were entrepreneurial companies ready with a fix for the year 2000 roll over problem in PCs. When the calendar on older computers hit midnight at the year end 1999, the computer would become confused and regress back to an earlier date.

One company developed a natty little card you could plug into your computer so it could make a smooth transition into the year 2000. By advertising this simple fix it was a godsend for computer repair companies.

As the year 1999 progressed there was a steady stream of enquires about getting the fix installed. It was the norm to install several cards at the one site. This was stress free work for the technician with no hassles. The results were a happy trio of collaborators: a justly rewarded manufacturing company, a very busy repair company and satisfied customers.

It was an extraordinary situation where all involved were aiming at a common deadline. What was the marketing method? The sales of the fix for the Y2K bug was achieved through a in-house newsletter called “Business Computing” sent out to customers by fax. Newspaper advertising costs would have been prohibitive.